A critical assessment of the Liturgical Reform after the second Vatican Council that seeks the origins of failure in pre-conciliar developments. 

This is a critical assessment of the Liturgical Reform after the second Vatican Council that seeks the origins of failure in pre-conciliar developments. If the suppression of the traditional Roman liturgy against the wishes of the Second Vatican Council was, in the words of Silvio Cardinal Oddi, 'a crime for which history will never forgive the Church', why, at the end of the 1960s, did the vast majority of Latin Catholics abandon, with little or no regret, their time-hallowed forms of worship? "The Banished Heart" seeks to account for this cultural and spiritual catastrophe by demonstrating what will surprise many: how the present mainstream Catholic Church, with its modernistic and secular aura, grew directly from the official conservatism of the Church as it was before the Council. T Clark Studies in "Fundamental Liturgy" offer cutting edge scholarship from all disciplines related to liturgical study. The books in the series seek to reintegrate biblical, patristic, historical, dogmatic and philosophical questions with liturgical study in ways faithful and sympathetic to classical liturgical enquiry. Volumes in the series include monographs, translations of recent texts and edited collections around very specific themes.

"There are some books whose breadth is so impressive, whose depth is so astonishing and whose lucidity is so sharp that writing a review of them seems as pointless as penning programme notes for a Wagner opera. Geoffrey Hull's The Banished Heart is just such a book." - Usus Antiquior

"There are lessons here for Anglicans as well as Roman Catholics, important questions about culture and liturgy, and challenges to acts of uniformity of many kinds... a defence of traditional liturgy which is at the same time critical of an authoritarian papacy is an unusual challenge." - The Church Times

"Hull’s historical narrative convincingly demonstrates that well before the Second Vatican Council, the Vatican’s growing theology of its own power led it to efforts to forcibly standardize liturgy across the Roman Communion in both the East and West...an important contribution to our historical understanding of liturgical change." - Religious Studies Review